Amazon Pushes Platform Features, API Gateway at AWS Summit

By
Michael Miller11 Jul 2015, 3:05 a.m.

I attended the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York yesterday, and was struck by how AWS has subtly changed its message over the years.

AWS now seems to be focused increasingly on providing tools aimed at making life easier for developers instead of focusing solely on creating an alternative infrastructure to in-house data centres. This was evident in the new product announcements—an API gateway and a farm for testing application compatibility across a wide range of Android and Amazon Fire phones and tablets.

Amazon Web Services Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels, who hosted the keynote, noted how the company has evolved. He began with the launch of AWS in 2006, a time when most of the benefits were on the business side, and Amazon was breaking out "from being held hostage by the traditional IT companies."

Vogels went on to note how the company has continually added features since then, observing that it launched 516 major new features and services in 2014 and would launch additional features this year. Amazon continues to branch out from infrastructure services and into security and management, management tools, platform services, enterprise apps, and, most recently, hybrid cloud management tools.

As he often does, he repeated the mantra that "cloud is the new normal." I was more interested, however, when he remarked that Amazon plans to move away from offering only infrastructure at the end of an API (applications program interface) to offering "platforms at the end of an API." In other words, it isn't simply an emphasis on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but also an emphasis on Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Of course, this isn't really new—Amazon has offered platform services for a long time, such as Elastic MapReduce (EMR), which runs on Hadoop, introduced in 2009, or the Dynamo DB noSQL database, introduced three years ago. But the change in emphasis seems notable.

In the keynote, Vogels discussed six major trends in computing, and Amazon's reactions to each. These included: moving quickly (easily spinning up or down various services); focusing on core competencies (letting enterprises focus on creating the code, while Amazon provides the infrastructure); having no servers (nor even server instances, and instead using event-driven services such as Kinesis for data streaming and Lambda for computing services); being secure and compliant (with multiple certifications, including HIPPA); going mobile (hosting the back-end of services that run on mobile devices); and putting data to work (with a focus on the company's machine-learning process).

I was particularly interested by the concept of deploying compute services without specifying or deploying specific servers, and instead using event-driven services such as Lambda. I can see where this could indeed make life easier for developers of certain kinds of services, and I remain fascinated by the potential applications of machine learning in a variety of fields.

The line for a later, more detailed session on Amazon ML was among the longest at the conference. That session mentioned possible applications ranging from personalisation and recommendation to fraud detection and targeted advertising. I can see where the cost of the service—10 cents per 1,000 predictions—could seem quite low for some predictions and quite high for others.

The new products were interesting and developer-oriented, with the most interesting of these being the new Amazon API Gateway, which allows a developer to more easily create and manage a scalable REST API around code he or she has written. As Amazon's Matt Wood explained, this supports all sorts of features, like versioning, metering and throttling, caching, signing and automation, and the ability to generate an SDK for JavaScript, iOS, or Android. The idea is to take a complex process and make it easy.

Other relatively new features include CodeCommit, a managed code repository; CodePipeline, a continuous delivery platform; Service Catalog, which enables organisation of a variety of services for a self-service environment; and the Device Farm, for testing applications on a wide range of real Android and Amazon Fire smartphones and tablets. (Note: this does not appear to include iOS devices.) Again, the focus seems mostly on making life easier for developers.

As has become common at developer keynotes, a number of customers talked about how they use Amazon Web Services. A Nordstrom executive mentioned a small team focused on cloud support that could now support over 50 application teams, to help these teams build better and faster applications. The CTO of the New York City Department of Transportation discussed using Amazon's back-end to power an application called Vision Zero View, which shows traffic fatalities and serious injuries going back to 2009, in hopes that New Yorkers will slow down and drive carefully. And the CTO of health insurance startup Oscar talked about how its use of Amazon services with HIPPA compliance enabled Oscar to have only two systems engineers for 45 developers working on up to 125 production changes per day. "We're done with physical data centres," he concluded.

Vogels emphasised that "it's all about moving fast," and noted that the number of tools only continues to grow. "There has never been a better time to build applications than right now," he said.

About the Author

Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.

Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in helping to identify new editorial needs in the marketplace and in shaping the editorial positioning of every Ziff ... See Full Bio